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Native of Khartoum lives in seclusion in Egypt as brother, ex-husband hunt for her.

NAIROBI, Kenya, December 10 (CDN) — A Sudanese woman who fled to Egypt after converting from Islam to Christianity is living in secluded isolation as her angry family members try to track her down.

Howida Ali’s Muslim brother and her ex-husband began searching for her in Cairo earlier this year after a relative there reported her whereabouts to them. While there, her brother and ex-husband tried to seize her 10-year-old son from school.

“I’m afraid of my brother finding us,” said the 38-year-old Ali, who has moved to another area. “Their aim is to take us back to Sudan, and there they will force us to return to the Islamic faith or sentence us to death according to Islamic law.”

Ali said she divorced her husband, Esam El deen Ali, because of his drug addiction in 2001, before she converted to Christianity. She was living with her parents in Khartoum when she began seeing visions of Christ, she said.

“In 2004, I started to see a vision of Christ speaking to me,” she told Compass. “When I shared it with my friend, who is a Muslim, she said that she used to hear these things from Christians.”

This comment spurred her to seek out a Christian friend from southern Sudan, who told her about Jesus Christ and prayed with her.

“After that time, I begun to see more visions from Christ saying, ‘He is Christ the Good Shepherd,” she said.

Fearing that relatives might discover she was a Christian, in 2007 she escaped with her then-8-year-old son. Previously the family had tried to stop her from leaving on grounds that she should not travel unescorted by an adult male relative, and because they disapproved of her divorce.

“They destroyed my passport, but through the assistance of a Christian friend, I acquired a new passport and secretly left,” she told Compass by e-mail.

Her peace in Egypt was short-lived; earlier this year, while Ali secretly attended church as she stayed with a Muslim relative in Cairo, the relative found out about her conversion to Christianity and notified her brother and ex-husband in Sudan.

They arrived in Cairo in July. She had found lodging at All Saints’ Cathedral, an Episcopal church in Cairo that houses a refugee ministry, but as it became clear that her brother and ex-husband were searching for her, refugee ministry officials moved her and her son to an apartment.

Ali said her brother and ex-husband sought to kill her for apostasy, or leaving Islam – with the support of relatives back in Sudan and others in the community, members of the Shaingia tribe who practice a strict form of Islam.

“Life became very difficult for me,” she said.

The Rev. Emmanuel S. Bennsion of All Saints’ Cathedral confirmed that Ali’s ex-husband and brother were acting on a tip from one of Ali’s relatives when they came searching for her in Cairo. They went to her son’s school to take him back to Sudan. It was a Christian school, and the director refused to hand the boy over to them, Bennsion said.

“Since that time, she has started hiding and become afraid,” Bennsion told Compass.

Ali had received financial support from family in Sudan through the relative in Cairo who notified her family of her conversion; that support has since vanished.

Fearing forcible repatriation to Sudan, Ali tried to go to Israel; Egyptian authorities arrested her at the border and jailed her for two months. During that time, she said, her son was put in an Islamic children’s home. A Muslim family had adopted him, but she was able to win back custody after leaving jail in October.

“We have stopped going out of the apartment or even going to church,” she said. “My son can no longer go to school daily as before. We cannot live our lives as before. I cannot now participate in the Bible study or fellowships – I’m now depending only on myself for growing spiritually, and for prayer and Bible study.”

She said her only hope for living her faith openly in Christian community is to secure asylum to another country that guarantees religious freedom.

Court grants custody of 3-year-old to woman, but police refuse to enforce order.

ISTANBUL, December 19 (Compass Direct News) – Egyptian authorities have refused to hand over a 3-year-old girl to her Christian mother even after a court granted her custody in a legal battle with her Muslim ex-husband.

Mervat Reszqallah of Tanta, 60 miles north of Cairo, was granted custody of her toddler daughter, Barthenia, by Judge Emaad Eldean Abedelhamed of the Court of Tanta on Aug. 7.

Police, however, have refused to implement the court’s decision to take the child from her father.

“Many times [the police] have ignored this decision, because they see the aspect of religion,” said human rights lawyer Naguib Gobrail, who said police favor the Muslim father.

Fady Farhaat Labbib converted to Islam in May of 2006 in order to divorce Reszqallah and marry another woman. He applied for custody of Barthenia in order to raise her as a Muslim. This has kept the police from doing their duty, said Gobrail.

“The police insisted that the daughter must follow the father, because they are afraid she will eat pork, drink wine, go to the church and be educated in the Sunday school,” he said.

Police recently summoned Reszqallah to the Tanta police station, where she spent five hours waiting for Labbib to hand over Barthenia in accordance with a police order.

Gen. Ramzy Taleab had ordered Labbib to the police station, but police reportedly did nothing on Reszqallah’s behalf when Labbib refused to hand over the child.

Gobrail said that the incident was a stunt to convince Reszqallah that police were doing their best.

“They made this order only to make the mother happy,” said Gobrail.

Gobrail said he plans to meet with Moushira Khattab of the Egyptian National Council for Childhood and Motherhood to discuss the welfare of children in mixed-religion custody battles.

Khattab, a former ambassador from Egypt to various African and European countries, was not available for comment.

Reszqallah recently returned from Lebanon, where she appeared on a Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation television program to talk about her situation. Gobrail said he hopes the publicity will lend weight to her case.

“Media can sometimes be a pressure on the authorities in Egypt, to make them ashamed,” said Gobrail.

Despite a fatwa from the Grand Mufti, Alexandria judge denies custody for mother.

ISTANBUL, October 2 (Compass Direct News) – Following the Appeal Court of Alexandria on Sept. 24 granting custody of 13-year-old Christian twins to their Muslim father, their mother lives with the fear that police will take away her children at any moment.

Kamilia Gaballah has fought with her ex-husband Medhat Ramses Labib over alimony support and custody of sons Andrew and Mario in 40 different cases since he left her and converted to Islam so that he could remarry in 1999.

The court ruled in favor of Labib in spite of Egyptian law’s Article 20, which grants custody of children to their mothers until the age of 15, and a fatwa (religious ruling) from Egypt’s most respected Islamic scholar, Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa, giving her custody.

“This decision was dangerous because it was not taken in accordance with Egyptian law but according to sharia [Islamic] law,” said Naguib Gobraiel, Gaballah’s lawyer and president of the Egyptian Union of Human Rights Organizations.

He explained that Egypt’s civic code calls for children under the age of 15 to stay with their mother regardless of their religion. Gobraiel said that sharia tends to favor the Muslim parent in such cases.

“They want to stay with their mother,” said Gobraiel. “They don’t know anything about Islam and sharia. They are Christians and go to church on Sundays.”

The twins have publicly stated their faith, and during a test in a mandatory religious class two years ago they scribbled only, “I am a Christian” on their answer sheets and otherwise turned them in blank. The twins intend to go on a hunger strike if they are forced to live with their Muslim father, whom they hardly know, sources said.

“We only want one thing,” said Gobraiel. “We want the law to be applied in our cases like this one, not the sharia, because the government owes us citizenship. This is a civilized, secular country, not a religious country.”

The decision of the presiding judge, El Sayed El Sherbini, to give the father full custody is not even based on sharia but is purely arbitrary, Gaballah and her eldest son George Medhat Ramses claimed, since the country’s State Mufti had granted custody to the mother in April 2006.

“We don’t want to give them to anyone or comply with the sentence,” Ramses told Compass. “All the legal ways have been wrong to us. We’ve been trying to make it as legal as we can, but the court has not been fair.”

Ramses, 21, who is also a Christian and lives with his mother and two little brothers, said the judged showed bias in favor of his father because he converted to Islam shortly after he left Gaballah.

“The decision was unfair and oppressive,” Gaballah told Compass. “I am treated differently than other Egyptians, as if this is not my own country.”

Gaballah, who has been fighting to keep her sons since the court decided in 2006 that custody of her sons should be given to her ex-husband, fears that her children will grow up without hope and a sense of justice.

“I am so sad and afraid about their psychology,” she said, “because they are facing something that is fundamentally against all the principles I have taught them.”

Gaballah said she is ready to keep fighting with the few means left in her power to keep her sons, even if it means tarnishing her with a criminal record by not handing them over to their father.

“And I’m determined to get justice in my own country, because it is my natural right and my sons’ right,” she said. “I cannot see how I can comply with the people who are taking my rights away from me and taking my children from me to give them to an unworthy father and another woman.”

Labib is now married to his third wife, with whom he has a 4-year-old son. He is a businessman working in exports and travels between Alexandria and Cairo.

Gobraiel said that he intends to send a clear message to Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak and the international human rights community that judgments like this one are hypocritical on the part of a government that claims to be “civilized.”

“How can they think we live in a civilized and secular country when they are applying sharia law on us?” he asked. “We will send a message to human rights organizations in Egypt and around the world to help us. We are angry and we want to declare it!”

Problematic Birth Certificates

Even under their father’s custody, the twins have the legal right to live with whomever they choose in two years, when they turn 15. But Ramses said he doubts the court would let them return to their mother.

“The same law that states that they should stay with mother until the age of 15 is the one that says they can decide where to live after the age of 15,” he explained. “If the court didn’t apply the first part of the law, they won’t apply the second.”

At the age of 16, when Mario and Andrew apply for their identification cards, they will face yet another hurdle, said Ramses. In 2005, Labib went to the population register and changed the twins’ birth certificates from Christian to Muslim, to reflect his own religion.

Now Ramses fears that a Sept. 23 court ruling in the case of Bahia Nagy El-Sisi, sentencing her to prison for three years for “forgery of an official document,” could be what awaits him and his little brothers. Nagy El-Sisi’s father had converted to Islam briefly in 1962, when she was 3 years old, and her documents were never altered to reflect the change as she remained a Christian. She and her sister discovered that their father had temporarily converted to Islam when the sister, Shadia Nagy, tried to issue marriage papers for her son.

Shadia Nagy was sentenced to three years in prison in 2007, also for “forgery.”

“These women are us in the future,” said Ramses.

Over the past few years, as Christians have found out about the twin boys’ case, Ramses said many have called them to give support. Many also have pledged to go on a hunger strike with the boys if they are handed over to their father.

“Christians see them as Coptic heroes and martyrs who stood up in front of all and said they were Christians and held on to it,” said Ramses. “All of them say they see the greatness of their ancestors and Christian heroes of long ago in them … and they carry a lot of respect and love for what they have done.”